I copied this excerpt from the conference call last quarter (January thru March). Notice that they were celebrating that they achieved over $1.2 million in sales for the first quarter of the year.
But now, they just announced $1.04 million in sales for the month of May alone!!!
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In the three months of 2018, we clearly set in motion our first objective. We delivered $1.2 million in revenues for the three months ended March 31, 2018. This represented our first quarter with more than $1 million in sales in corporate history and we grew revenues at an impressive 38%. At aim to second quarter, we’re happy to report, we exceeded $1 million in sales in the month of April alone, due in part to the acquisition of Trico. This is a clear and strong validation that our strategy is working. We also have kept a clear focus on cost control. With our recent acquisitions, it became increasingly difficult to make year-over-year comparisons to our cost structure for at least several quarters. Having said that, our base line SG&A expenses for the first quarter were $3.1 million, which represents a 20% increase compared to the $2.6 million incurred in the same period in 2017.
However, we incurred over $600,000 in non-cash expenses in the first quarter. We also incurred about $650,000 in nonrecurring expenses, strictly related to our acquisitions and our capital markets activities in the first quarter. We spent significant resources integrating specifically the accounting, the IT and the operational platforms for the three acquisitions as well as excessive travel for training, sales, operations integrations and management transitions. We believe we’re now fully passed this space as we saw significant decrease in these costs in April. As a result, we believe our normalized cash SG&A expenses are approximately $1.9 million per quarter. Payroll is our largest single expense and we consider -- when we consider the Company increased its employee base from only 38 employees in the first quarter of 2017 to 54 at the end of first quarter 2018 and now over 80 employees at the end of April are successful efforts to cost control we more clearly can see.
As direct support for our improved financial performance, we would like to highlight our cash flows from operations. This in my mind is one of the best metrics we’re evaluating for the short-term financial health of the Company.
From MagneGas, we have produced a negative cash flow from operations of $1.3 million in the first quarter of 2018. However, as previously described, this figure included $650,000 in expenses, we clearly deem to be nonrecurring. When those are excluded, our cash flow from operations was a negative $650,000. This represents a 57% improvement in cash flows compared to the same period last year. Again, considering that we employed significantly more people in the first quarter, this is a significant indication of our improved performance, and we believe that this will continue to be a trend in coming quarters. From a balance sheet perspective, we also made significant improvements during the first quarter. We dramatically reduced our accrued vendor liabilities and overall expenses by more than 50%. This was largely masked by that fact that we added over 300,000 additional vendor liabilities when we acquired Complete Welding and Green Arc during the first quarter. In addition, we paid down our -- we continued to pay down our senior debt by more than 50% in the first quarter, and we’re planning to fully retire this debt in the near-term.
We also carried more than $2 million in cash on hand and had a positive working capital position of $2.1 million as compared to a $2.7 million deficit as of March 31, 2017. This represents almost $5 million improvement in our net working capital in the past year. Operationally, our integration of Complete Welding of San Diego is now fully complete. We expect the final stages of our accounting transition for Green Arc to take place in the next 30 days. We then expect to complete the integration of all of Trico’s operations by the end of June. Overall, we’ve minimized costs, managed operations and made the transition seamless for vendors and customers across the United States. We’re very proud of the way our team has handled this entire process.
